Celebrating Transformative Women: Part 1

In celebration of International Women's Day 2025, which falls on Saturday 8^th March we are thrilled to present a series of interviews with three transformative women at Lancia Consult that we’ll be sharing over 3 days around the International Women’s Day weekend. These women have led transformational careers and are pivotal in enabling our clients to achieve extraordinary transformations.  

These women embody the innovation, resilience, and leadership spirit that drives our business forward. Read about their experiences, insights, and advice as we ask them each three questions to uncover the moments that shaped their careers, the projects that defined their success, and the wisdom they wish to share with aspiring professionals.

3 Women, 3 days, 3 questions!

Today we meet, Rebecca Andrew, a Director in our European business.

Can you share a pivotal moment in your career that significantly influenced your journey in consulting? What was the challenge, and how did you overcome it? ‍

Pivotal moment: Leaving KPMG, I'm naturally a very loyal person, and I was really bound to KPMG. I am very grateful for the opportunities I was given while there. However, my needs as a consultant were evolving. I took a sabbatical and did some travelling. Upon returning, I decided not to go back to KPMG but to start out consulting life in small boutiques. I was so torn about whether to leave or not and the value of being part of such a big network, plus somewhere I had been for a substantial amount of time.  

Moving from a big firm to a small consultancy was really hard, and this was a big shift for me. If I hadn't left then, I would have stayed at KPMG for my whole career. But it was good and the right thing for me to change gears.  

Moving into a small consultancy left you vulnerable; you no longer had a big brand behind you, and I found the biggest challenge was that there was always a sense of proving when you had to start with a new client. Difficult, but this made me step into my own space and build my confidence in a new way. I wasn't part of a machine anymore, and I needed to step up and find myself.  

How have you leveraged your expertise to drive transformation for your clients? Can you give an example of a project where your work made a significant impact?

The project I am always drawn to talk about was one early in my consulting career. We were really working on the cutting edge of innovation, which sounds odd to talk about in consulting. However, I couldn't google anything then, and no thought leadership was circulating to prompt your ideas. We were working in the data space but using the data and tracking to help shape the way financial instructions addressed regulation. The work we did on this project helped the client answer their initial problem and continue to open up a world of possibilities. The work became a platform to bring to light different institutional problems and ways we could go about fixing them.  

The value of having a consultant is the driving force power you can have to help make a difference. I went in and helped our client see the gaps clearly and drive progress.

For context, we created a data dictionary and then tracked data in and out of systems to create a map of the investment bank. We then helped improve the data quality and highlighted areas where we could see they had things like 3 ordering systems and decommissioned systems. Then we started getting all systems to only go to get data from a golden source, so people knew what they had was correct.  

Someone changed a bit of code in a system, resulting in a trader being able to do some illegal trades in Japan. They used our data to track the data flow and work out the source of the problem. There was a global outage across the whole of the investment bank because of this; it was massive, and our data helped fix it. It was incredible.  

What advice would you give to other women aspiring to build a successful career in consulting? What lessons have you learned along the way that you wish you had known earlier?

You can be brilliant at this. There are not many women in the industry; you're needed for so many reasons. We must appreciate that consulting is hard; this isn't an easy job, but that's also okay. It's also a difficult profession to explain to people who aren't in it.  

My career is a lot of my identity, which I'm okay with. Being in consulting shows professionalism and immediately shows me that you've worked hard.  

With this information, I wish I had known that there is a breaking point; it will differ for different people. But there is a point where you don't think about it anymore when you're naturally confident and know that you have this. A point where it does become easier. Ironically, that's probably at a point in your life when you add other factors that increase life's complexity. Perhaps why it gets easier is because it has to. In which case people should trust and know and force this to be an easier profession to become a part of.